Shirley MacLaine

“The Method school [Brando, Clift, Dean] thinks the emotion is the art. It isn’t. All emotion isn’t sublime. The theater isn’t reality. If you want reality, go to the morgue. The theater is human behavior that is effective and interesting.“—Agnes Moorehead[Read more…] about Friday Photos: True Hollywood Confessions

Jimmy Cagney and Mae Clarke having a great time working together, Lady Killer, 1933.

Labor Day affords us the opportunity to reflect on work, our jobs, present and past. Good jobs, bad jobs, we’ve all had our share of both.

Work should set you free. Honest labor puts money in your pocket which allows you to spend that money as you see fit. Ideally, work infuses the individual with a sense of self-worth and dignity.

In Judaism, work is viewed as a vital adjunct to the observance and study of Torah:

Im ayn kemach, ayn Torah.

If there is no bread [work], there is no study of Torah.

—Ethics of the Fathers, (Avos 3:21)

Thus, the Torah invests labor with a deep spiritual value.

But let’s be honest, in any work environment there is gossip. And office gossip can be terribly destructive.

Hollywood has always been a hothouse for nasty personal attacks. But in the past, these vendettas were usually reserved for post-career memoirs and late night interviews—Johnny Carson, Dick Cavett, David Frost, etc—that today, appear sweetly disagreeable.

But in postmodern America, where traditional values of respect and restraint are not even a dim memory, Hollywood gossip has become an industry unto itself. Unsavory gossip is now mainstream, brought to you in the form of entertainment and reality shows—which are neither entertaining nor real.

America has even elected a president who regularly slings gossip disguised as social-political wisdom. Obama’s remarks about the “stupid” Boston police, about being Trayvon Martin’s father, even his off-the-cuff remark about a Syrian red line—these are instances of politics as gossip; an indication of the deep moral and intellectual corruption of Obama & Co., and of the liberal political class who are unmoored from the basics of a civil society.

Anyhoo.

Here are a few of Seraphic Secret’s favorite, and not-so-secret snipes—touchingly tame by today’s appalling standards—brought to you some of Hollywood’s best-loved stars about other best-loved stars.

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How I Married Karen

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About Me
Robert J. Avrech
Los Angeles, California

I'm an Emmy Award winning screenwriter. I'm also an observant Jew, a religious Zionist, a conservative Republican, and a member of the NRA. I've been writing and producing in Hollywood for over twenty-five years. But the focus of my life is my family: my radiant wife, Karen—with whom I have been in love with since I was nine years-old—and my two daughters, who, thankfully, look like Karen. Not too long ago, we had three children. But our son, Ariel, died at the age of twenty-two from cancer. We miss him terribly. We think about him practically every minute of every day. People tell us that time heals, but Karen and I know this is not true. Time grinds away doing its terrible work. Ariel is gone. Yet absence becomes presence.

Ariel Chaim Avrech, ZT'L, May His Righteous Memory be a Blessing.

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Annual Ariel Avrech
Memorial Lectures
Young Israel of Century CityNOTE: Click on video titles inside the thumbnail images, below, to open that video in YouTube

Fifteenth: June 10, 2018Jackie Danicki: “Confessions of a Convert: A Humbling, Joyful Journey to Judaism.”